Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren: "I knew beforehand that it was going to be pretty much a guitar record. I wanted to do a bit of experimenting with sounds and arrangements, and push the keyboards, if any, as far into the background as appropriate. Part of the whole approach for this album has to do with recent history and circumstances, which found me performing in this sort of format for the past couple of years. It had a lot to do with my experience with the New Cars and the fact that we were supposed to do a tour that ended abruptly when our lead guitar player broke his collarbone. So I had to quickly scramble something together in order to stay performing and not be looking at a year of nothing. It turned out that I put together an old-fashioned guitar quartet — two guitars, bass and drums. And it also turned out that the fans were really eating it up. They really liked the return to this kind of prior incarnation."

TR: "I like the opportunity to do both, as it keeps me from becoming blasé and stale about either one of them. I don't spend as much time in the studio as I used to, mostly because of the ongoing evolution of the industry and the fact that recording technology has become so acceptable for so many artists that almost everyone has their own little studio nowadays. I keep myself busy doing my own records and doing a lot more live performances than I would have done in years where my production schedule was richer."

TR: "It is only practical for me to go so far at this point, because I'm travelling kind of gypsy-style. We don't have the big tour bus. Fuel costs and other expenses have made that a luxury at this point and something you can only practically do if you've got relatively short routes in between the gigs. Instead, we find ourselves flying from place to place. We have a company that provides me with an amplifier on the road and ideally I download my sounds into it. But often, because there will be variations in model numbers or something will not work, I find myself manually tuning up the sounds at the last minute before the doors open. So it isn't really practical for me to get too anal about the exact sound of the studio. But I'm very concerned that the band does play the proper arrangements. So though the sound may not be exactly the same, the arrangement has to be pretty much the way I recorded it."

TR: "I use a Line 6 Flextone III with a 2 x 12. I have an amp that I own at home, which I take with me for use in the smaller venues. It's an old Line 6 AX2. The model actually goes back to the Tube Tone line of software amp models. If I'm playing larger venues, I'll use another Line 6, but utilise it as a stack — a separate head and two cabinets.

TR: "The backup for me isn't particularly important. But since recently we've been having a bit of trouble with the sounds of my guitar, I did pick up another guitar that is completely dissimilar in shape, but has the same pickup layout and same active electronics as Foamy. But I pretty much don't change guitars live. I do the whole show with just that same guitar."

TR: "My singular strategy is to keep my voice as low as I can possibly stand it. A lot of people are just the opposite; they want to hear the voice as loud as possible. There was a time where I depended heavily on in-ear monitors in order to get the voice where I wanted it, but over time I began to experience a lot of discomfort and other assorted problems with the use of in-ear monitors. So as a strategy I began using these Bose stage monitor towers [Bose Cylindrical Radiators]. They are two really narrow towers that have a 180-degree spread and are actually two units stacked one on top of each other. I've taken them off the towers and mounted them on front of the stage on some football kicking tees. And what that amounts to is a 6ft-long, extremely low-profile monitor that pretty much saturates anywhere I may be on the stage.

TR: "Jesse will come in first and noodle around for about 20 minutes with his sound, as he will also be using a different amp every night. Even though for the most part he usually requests a Fender Twin Reverb, the variations and sounds in that particular amp can be really radical from monitor to monitor.

TR: "There have been tours, like the Liars tour for example, that depended a whole lot on things like computer sequences, special audio interfaces and multi-channel interfaces we would need to click track with the drummer throughout and still have a stereo sound for the house with the sequences that were running. On this tour, though, we are only doing that on one particular song. And if there was another way that we could do that, we probably would. Usually, on a lot of tours you would have one person whose sole responsibility is to make sure those kinds of cues happen properly, but I don't like to depend too much on other sorts of augmentation. I, for example, try and get enough singers in the band so we don't have to use samples to cover gaps and important vocal parts.

TR: "I suppose that is just part of the job. There are different styles of production and I've seen producers who, as part of their style, profess to love every note they hear the artist make. But I think that really depends on people's moods and a little bit less on being able to communicate specific things musically. Having been a musician, I can be fairly concise about changes that I think should happen and I'm not particularly shy about it. Especially in pre-production, where I have to give an artist a frank opinion about the material they intend to record.

TR: "Aside from making the drums tuneful and trying to make the guitar sounds have the necessary balance of aggressiveness and clarity, I don't think that sound is a highly critical factor. The sound is, in a sense, the most subjective aspect of what you're doing. And if you look at the history of music, prioritising things to the material first, the performance second and the sound third has always been a more successful formula when it comes to making records than being concerned firstly about the sound, the performance secondly and the quality of the material thirdly. In other words, people will listen to a half-arsed performance with crappy sound of a really good song more readily than they will listen to a great performance of a crappy song that was recorded really well."

TR: "I suppose it is the delusion that I still have something to say. You could probably postulate that every song of any importance has already been written because we're dealing with such a limited vocabulary to start with. Here in the West, we have a 12-tone scale and, mathematically, because of that you're going to wind up repeating all of the significant combinations of those notes. So it is just a question of did you do it so blatantly that you had to be taken to court by somebody, à la 'My Sweet Lord' and 'He's So Fine'? That particular example makes you think that somebody must have definitely known how close they were, but just chose to ignore it. Eventually, the chickens came home to roost on that matter.

TR: "There is this whole era of music that existed before Thomas Edison first figured out how to capture 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'. All music prior to that was performed live. The only way a musician made his living was to perform music for people. And it may be that this whole era of recorded music has an illusionary aspect of that element to it, and now it's sort of settling into where it should rightly be. If you don't have an opportunity to see a musician actually play, you listen to the recorded music.